This week’s issue of the Economist reduces the vast diversity of Hispanic Americans to a single fruit: chili peppers.

The administration’s flagrant violations of the Constitution, the push to favor illegal aliens over anyone who’s a legal immigrant (I can go on all day) don’t fire up Vox’s belly, but chili peppers do.

The Economist’s op-ed looks at the factors why Brazil’s economy grew by only 0.9% in 2012:

The world’s most burdensome tax code

Absurdly generous pensions

Spending only 1.5% of GDP on infrastructure, compared with a global average of 3.8%

Gross public debt has climbed to 60-70% of GDP

The Economist recommends that Brazil do three things:

It needs to rediscover an appetite for reform by reshaping public spending, especially pensions.
. . .
Second, it must make Brazilian business more competitive and encourage it to invest
. . .
Third, Brazil urgently needs political reform

“All you have to do is read the records of the São Paulo Forum and observe the conduct of the Brazilian government,” he said. “The friends of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, of Dilma Rousseff and the Workers Party are the enemies of the United States: Chavist Venezuela, first with (Hugo) Chávez and now with (Nicolás) Maduro; Raúl Castro’s Cuba; Iran; Evo Morales’ Bolivia; Libya at the time of Gadhafi; Bashar Assad’s Syria.
…
“Cuban influence in Brazil is covert but very intense. José Dirceu, Lula da Silva’s former chief of staff and his most influential minister, had been an agent of the Cuban intelligence services. In exile in Cuba, he had his face surgically changed. He returned to Brazil with a new identity (Carlos Henrique Gouveia de Mello, a Jewish merchant) and functioned in that capacity until democracy was restored. Hand in hand with Lula, he placed Brazil among the major collaborators with the Cuban dictatorship. He fell into disgrace because he was corrupt but never retreated one inch from his ideological preferences and his complicity with Havana.”

please write more about the Forum of Sao Paulo, the organization created by Brazil’s Lula and Castro to change Latin America into an united Marxist region. Brazil has totally fallen to Marxism and is now engaged in the help of all marxist partners.

Brazil has already received the first of 4000 Cuban physicians who will come to indoctrinate Brazilian poor people on the wonders of communism. These guys are not even certified as doctors and are slaves who never see their salaries (money goes directly to Fidel).

Add to that the immense, structural corruption, and the drug trade from fellow Foro member Bolivia.

Back in 2009 The Economist had a picture of the Corcovado Christ as a rocket. Now the rocket is on a crash course:

The Hispanic American Center for Economic Research (HACER) and the Fundación para el Progreso “Jean Gustave Courcelle-Seneuil” of Chile, joined efforts to publish and promote “Interventionism and Misery: 1929-2008″ a book devoted to understand the nature of past and future economic crises around the world. With a perspective of Austrian economics, Axel Kaiser explains the causes of the Great Depression in 1929, the crisis that started in 2008, the role of statism in the road to ruin and the key importance of the gold standard and capitalism for a prosper future.

Ralph J. Benko says in the prologue: “Interventionism and Misery: 1929-2008 by Axel Kaiser is an important book. Economics has become, in Kaiser’s apt word, an astrology. The more miserable grow our economies the more pretentious grow professional economists. […] Statism is based on faith, not reason. The Black Stone – the primordial artifact – of the Kaaba of canonical economics today is the claim that the free market somehow caused, and failed to cure, the Great Depression. Axel Kaiser directly and capably critiques this, the very foundational myth upon which statism, that most modern of religions, is built. He capably strips away much of the veneer of theoretical legitimacy upon which statism depends.”

The national debt jumped by $72 billion on Tuesday even as the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives passed a continuing resolution to fund the government for just three weeks that will cut $6 billion from government spending.

If Congress were to cut $6 billion every three weeks for the next 36 weeks, it would manage to save between now and late November as much money as the Treasury added to the nation’s net debt during just the business hours of Tuesday, March 15.
…Congress would need to cut spending by $6 billion every three weeks for approximately the next six and a half years (338 weeks) just to equal the $676.3 billion the debt has increased thus far this fiscal year.

Despite his resounding electoral victory, his solid majorities in both chambers of Congress and the obvious goodwill of the bulk of the electorate, Mr Obama has seemed curiously feeble.

Empty posts, weak policies

There are two main reasons for this. The first is Mr Obama’s failure to grapple as fast and as single-mindedly with the economy as he should have done. His stimulus package, though huge, was subcontracted to Congress, which did a mediocre job: too much of the money will arrive too late to be of help in the current crisis. His budget, though in some ways more honest than his predecessor’s, is wildly optimistic. And he has taken too long to produce his plan for dealing with the trillions of dollars of toxic assets which fester on banks’ balance-sheets.

The failure to staff the Treasury is a shocking illustration of administrative drift. There are 23 slots at the department that need confirmation by the Senate, and only two have been filled. This is not the Senate’s fault. Mr Obama has made a series of bad picks of people who have chosen or been forced to withdraw; and it was only this week that he announced his candidates for two of the department’s four most senior posts. Filling such jobs is always a tortuous business in America, but Mr Obama has made it harder by insisting on a level of scrutiny far beyond anything previously attempted. Getting the Treasury team in place ought to have been his first priority.

Second, Mr Obama has mishandled his relations with both sides in Congress. Though he campaigned as a centrist and promised an era of post-partisan government, that’s not how he has behaved. His stimulus bill attracted only three Republican votes in the Senate and none in the House. This bodes ill for the passage of more difficult projects, such as his big plans for carbon-emissions control and health-care reform. Keeping those promises will soon start to bedevil the administration. The Republicans must take their share of the blame for the breakdown. But if Mr Obama had done a better job of selling his package, and had worked harder at making sure that Republicans were included in drafting it, they would have found it more difficult to oppose his plans.

Obama, alas, is the worst of both worlds, having neither gubernatorial experience nor much Washington experience. He’s been an incredibly talented dilettante, getting elected to one job and then the next without learning the ropes. He’s a fast learner and will get the hang of it but, to come back to the Hillary Clinton quip that starts the Economist piece, “the Oval Office is no place for on-the-job-training.” Except, as already noted, that it usually is.

But now we’re hearing “buyer’s regret” from The Economist – and it’s not even 100 days yet. Mark Steyn thinks it’s going to be a long four years:

This is the point: The nuancey boys were wrong on Obama, and the knuckledragging morons were right. There is no post-partisan centrist “grappling” with the economy, only a transformative radical willing to make Americans poorer in the cause of massive government expansion. At some point, The Economist, Messrs Brooks, Buckley & Co are going to have to acknowledge this. If they’re planning on spending the rest of his term tutting that his management style is obstructing the effective implementation of his centrist agenda, it’s going to be a long four years.